Friday, November 6, 2015

DON'T THOW THE BUMS OUT.

Jon Grinspan wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine noting the
comparable issues of America's disenchantment with their representatives
now and during our historical past.

I've often used the phrase,
Throw The Bums Out when I was disgruntled over some fumble from our
local Board of Supervisors, but more often over our state and national
legislators. I'm excerpting Grinspan's article because it gives a different
perspective.

"Voters are in a bad mood. Again." he writes. "We
are routinely (and justifiably) frustrated with our politicians, but
“throwing the bums out” doesn’t seem to change much. And we are all
bracing for another anger-pageant that will stomp through American life
for the next 12 months until election day.

It was
too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe
that bad politicians were just immoral people. The young writer had
bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan...where he honed his
scorching prose, and learned about New York’s “low-life,” as a crime
reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. One politico
called him “a born crook that’s gone straight.”

Like
many Americans, Steffens grew up cursing his leaders. Between 1865 and
1900, frustrated citizens pointed to the never-ending string of
political scandals and stolen elections, as leaders failed to address
the massive traumas of the Gilded Age.

Attacking
leaders was an easy route to becoming one. Self-impressed tycoons,
high-toned editors and rising politicians “greedy for power” all
insisted that they knew how to clean up politics. Replace bad, immoral
men with “the best men”—wealthy, God-fearing, respectable—and the
democracy would fix itself. And by “the best men,” they meant themselves.

Angry
voters tried this approach, throwing the bums out in election after
election. Control of Congress changed hands with dizzying speed in the
1880s and 1890s, yet politics only grew more corrupt.

But
as a crime reporter who befriended crooked cops and scheming politicos,
Steffens stumbled onto a new approach to journalism. Instead of
moralizing, he listened. People would talk, he found, if you let them.
Steffens hung around police stations and pool halls, absorbing
everything he could. He even tolerated the ceaseless lectures of a young
police commissioner named Teddy Roosevelt (though Steffens devised ways
to shut his new friend up). And he refused to sit, isolated, in New
York, setting out across the country to study dirty tricks from Boston
to San Francisco.

Steffens came away with two
major insights. Bad politicians were not necessarily bad people.
Steffens concluded that the angry public was focused on the wrong
problem. Political dirty tricks were not “exceptional, local, and
criminal…not an accidental consequence of the wickedness of bad men...,"
Americans—obsessed with individualism—liked to rage against immoral
men, but really it was big, impersonal structures—like the steady drip
of campaign contributions—that did more to buy power and harm the
democracy.

Steffens began to write, furiously,
publishing his “dawning theory” in his famous “Shame of the Cities”
series in McClure’s Magazine between 1901 and 1904. Often, angry
middle-class citizens, looking for someone to blame, perpetuated the
pointless cycle of reform and relapse, throwing out individuals but
failing to make real change. ...a way to avoid considering the deeper
problems with their political system.

American
voters began to see that the country’s political problems were, really,
social problems. Instead of hollering about immoral bosses, reformers
simply went around them, introducing primary elections, ballot
initiatives, recall votes, and eventually the direct election of
senators. Progressive activists focused on improving political
structures, not electoral “lynchings” of the bad guys.

And
in our time of anger at politicians, it’s important to consider where
bad leaders come from. ...politicians are, as a group, no better or
worse than the rest of us. If they stink, something’s rotten with the
system that feeds them. As long as we see politics as a
war between good and bad individuals, ignoring the structures that
reward or punish them, this will continue.

The most compelling words, "the steady drip of campaign contributions" and the word "activists."

We
need to be activists, and it is easy on-line to sign petitions and reply as a group to leverage change. When asked to contribute, I answer that as soon as YOU get the money out of politics, I'll be glad to contribute. Above all, we need to get rid of Citizens
United. Every chance to sign a petition or to vote to rid ourselves of
that unrighteous production of the court, will help restore balance in our democracy.